They talk about how the despondency of finishing a book or whatever project that you have thought about, and slaved over for months, and then have the mountainous task of trying to find someone who might publish it…

So deciding to publish a book via Kickstarter is about seeing the project through yourself, until you have the finished artefact in your hand, rather than waiting for someone else, someone who has no real care for the work you’ve done, to make it for you.

… and that the best state for anyone who wants to live a creative life is, rather than craving success, one of ‘sustainable creativity’:

that so long as you have the time and money to continue doing the work you love to do, that’s about all that matters. You live cheaply so you fulfilled by the work you love

Kickstarter requires a certain amount of selling yourself – but this selling yourself can be in whatever form you decide. (This is what I’ve been trying to work out with what I’ve written about self-promotion.) It doesn’t have to be in the form of insidious marketing – for me, anytime you are telling people about something you are suggesting they might want to pay money for, you have to offer them something more as well, information, inspiration, value. The things which really need selling, the things which have huge marketing budgets, are those with less innate value – otherwise they wouldn’t need all that promotion.

Making stuff that you, and other people value – that’s all we need to do. Selling the stuff, at a low level of sustainable creativity, can come later.